LoRa-based communication system for data transfer in microgrids

This paper proposes a LoRa-based wireless communication system for data transfer in microgrids. The proposed system allows connection of multiple sensors to the LoRa transceivers, and enables data collection from various units within a microgrid. The proposed system focuses on communications at the secondary communication level of the microgrid between local controllers of each distributed generation (DG) unit and the microgrid central controller due to the possibility of applying low-bandwidth communication systems at this level. In a proof of concept test bed setup, the data collected by the sensors are sent to the LoRa gateway, which serves as the central monitoring system from which control messages are sent to various microgrid components through their local controllers such as DG units, storage systems and load. In this work, to improve communication security, a private server has been developed using Node-Red instead of cloud servers that are currently used in most Internet-of-Things (IoT) monitoring systems. A range test of the proposed system is carried out to observe the rate of data delivery. It demonstrated over 90% data delivery at 4 km. Finally, a test bed experiment is conducted to validate key features of the proposed system by achieving one-directional data transfer in a grid monitoring system.